I will first illustrate two key conclusions from the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, from 2021. The first states that “it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”. The second states that “global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.” I will then explain how these results built on the work of Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, respectively, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2021. The second of the statements was made possible through remarkable research progress during the past decade, and I will demonstrate how the scientific process within the IPCC turned a seeming scientific crisis into substantial progress. Finally, I will look at the still unsolved problem of understanding the future of the Atlantic Ocean circulation and how we tackle this problem in current research.
Slides here...

Conical intersections often control the reaction products of photochemical processes and occur when two electronic potential energy surfaces intersect. Theory predicts that the conical intersection will result in a geometric phase for a wavepacket on the ground potential energy surface, and although conical intersections have been observed experimentally, the geometric phase has not been directly observed in a molecular system. Here we use a trapped atomic ion system to perform a quantum simulation of a conical intersection. The ion’s internal state serves as the electronic state, and the motion of the atomic nuclei is encoded into the motion of the ions. The simulated electronic potential is constructed by applying state-dependent optical forces to the ion. We experimentally observe a clear manifestation of the geometric phase using adiabatic state preparation followed by motional state measurement. Our experiment shows the advantage of combining spin and motion degrees for quantum simulation of chemical reactions. We conclude with a discussion of future simulation directions.